Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a privilege to be able to participate in this debate, moved by the good member for Batman, on sacking ministers. The member for Batman has a lot of form in not only sacking ministers but actually sacking prime ministers. So we should go back: we are now a little over 12 months in to cleaning up the mess from the worst, most incompetent and most dysfunctional government in our nation's history. Across every portfolio, every minister that has come into their portfolio has had an absolutely diabolical mess to clean up.

I would like to, perhaps, pose the question: which minister has inherited the greatest mess and has had the greatest problems with what they have had to clean up? I will start with the Treasurer. We should remember that the past financial year was the year that the budget was meant to be in surplus. We can remember the former Treasurer standing at the dispatch box and saying 'the four years of surpluses I announce tonight' and 'this budget delivers a surplus'. Well, we know what happened. There was no surplus; there was a deficit—a $48 billion deficit. Then we could look at the Minister for Small Business. What was the mess that he inherited? There are 500,000 fewer jobs in the small business sector and 3,000 fewer small businesses employing people after this mess. Or perhaps we could look at the Minister for Foreign Affairs, who has been trying to clean up the debacle of a previous minister whose main concerns were about whether he had silk pyjamas, about traveling first class or about the quality of the meal in business class. Or we could look at the Minister for Communications. He had to clean up the mess of the NBN, with a catastrophic blow-out of $29 billion. Or perhaps we could look at the Minister for Education and the mess that he has had to clean up. Under Labor's reign, according to the World Economic Forum, our educational standards in this country slipped from eighth in the world all the way back to 23rd. And then we have the ministers for industry and the environment. They have had to clean up the mess of the carbon tax, which put Australia's industry at a competitive disadvantage. And then, of course, the minister for immigration could also challenge for the award.

Mr Champion interjecting—

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